FridgeirThe Feeder of wolves fell, worker of evil deeds. The poet chopped Ljot’s leg off, I brought Fridgeir peace. I do not ask reward from the splasher of gold for that. The spears’ din was fun enough, the fight with the pale man. -from “Egil’s Saga”

The GOP ticket’s appalling contempt for science and learning.

In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn’t seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place “in Paris, France” and winding up with a folksy “I kid you not.”